Comments

There was a lady in Kissammee who used to send me something like this every summer from the watered lawn in front of her front door in a retirement community. I suspect that “her species” is very adapted to wet subtropics. If this is true they would be most likely in the rainiest time of the year…perhaps they also require rather warm temperatures.

They may not be rare in the right place at the right time. But I don’t have enough information to know. This is the case for most limacellas.

They were really slimy but were sticky, and the veil was flimsy, or fragile, but I don’t remember if it was also slimy/sticky in the same manner as the stipe. I was working the night shift doing bird research monitoring at the time and didn’t keep these- I actually set them down by my stuff but forgot to pick them up when I left! However, I’ll be working there this time next month and will hopefully find more. Are these rare?

Can you help us? After you took the photos, did the apparent ring on the stipe collapse and get gooey or did it persist as a dry membranous partial veil? I have to agree with Tatiana that the material makes me think of a Limacella. I’m looking for an excuse to just bite the apple.

Also, could you dry material and send me a bit of it? If this is a Limacella, then it is quite similar to the ones described on these pages:

My remaining (<—EDIT) problem is that a moist stipe and a membranaous partial veil are not known to co-exist in Limacella.

In the “moist stemmed” limacellas (sect. Lubricae), the developing fruitbody begins with a stem and then develops a cap (standard Agaric practice). When the edge of the cap reaches down to the point at which it touches the stem, the “slime retaining” hyphae of the cap and of the stipe become intergrown creating a “cortina-like” partial veil that is broken when the cap edge (which is originally rolled up in a spiral) unrolls and expands away from the stem. Part of the remainder of the “cortina-like” structure collapses on the stem and marks the top of the stem’s slimy zone.

This stem has a wet zone very much like that of a species in Limacella sect. Lubricae. My puzzle is with the apparent remnants of a dry membranous partial veil.

but I went a step further in my indecisiveness. At first I thought it was a Limacella, then I saw the ring and what looked like a dry stem…. but then again I took a close look at the first image in the highest available resolution, and there you can see that the stipe is wet after all: there are small sparks of reflected light from the camera flash all over the stipe surface. You can also notice the that the stipe is sticky in the second picture – the fruitbody on the left is “glued” to the hand. So, maybe it’s a Limacella, albeit not a very classic-looking one, after all…